Recently I posted a question to several groups on Linked In. The question was simply; "When do you contact your web leads?" I am a member of two types of groups, Demand Generation/Marketing and Sales. The responses were night and day different between the two camps. In the Marketing and Demand Gen groups, the responders often said it was best to wait 24-48 hours. One even said that you should make a goal of calling every web lead within the first four days. On the otherside, the Sales responders all felt that a call should be made immediatly or as quickly as possible.
Here is a quesiton to get you thinking; why would there be a difference (and it was overwhelmingly obvious) between Marketings and Sales approach? I would have thought it would have been the opposite. Maybe Marketers are leaning more towards nurturing a lead and bringing it around slowly where as Sales has a quota and wants to exhaust all resources in the attempts to get the deal.
No real answer, just some points to ponder. Please comment with your thoughts.
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
New Marketing
I have read, and employed numerous marketing methods over the years for numerous types of business. The one that I have been most impressed with is Educational Marketing. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, Educational Marketing is the idea of providing educational material (such as a study, survey, white paper, etc...) as an industry expert with no strings attached. If you can educate your industry, you will be seen as a thought leader, you will gain the trust of prospects, you will have their attention even when they are not in the market for your product, and you will have a high level of influence when they are in the market for your product. This method is very effective, but it can take a long time to generate quality leads and deals for you and takes a lot of effort in developing rich content for your educational material.
Recently I have been turned on to a new way of marketing. I don't know how new it is but it warrants mentioning on my blog. It is Service Marketing. Service Marketing doesn't just provide information, but it provides a service. There are some key components when creating a service for your company that can act as a lead generator:
Recently I have been turned on to a new way of marketing. I don't know how new it is but it warrants mentioning on my blog. It is Service Marketing. Service Marketing doesn't just provide information, but it provides a service. There are some key components when creating a service for your company that can act as a lead generator:
- It must relate to your product of service.
- It must be offered, in a limited manner, for free at first.
- It must have value in and of itself.
- It should be offered at a very low price to eliminate any barrier to the prospect doing business with you.
If done successfully, you could end up with a double opt-in buyer lead that has a relationship with your company.
Here is an example:
Call 1- Hi, We have performed an audit on your hold times for customer service. Are you interested in the results?
This is opt in #1
Send results
Call 2- Hi, we did a study on the importance of handling customer service calls in a timely manner. Would you be interested in a copy of that study? I will also attach information on the audit as a service we offer.
This is opt in #2
Send study and brochure talking about the service you provide. The cost should be a no brainer. Much less than what they can hire an $8 per hour high school student to sit on hold and report times back to them.
If they buy, they now have a relationship with you and are a double opt in buyer lead for your real products and services.
If you need some ideas on services you can offer, feel free to email me at troy.bingham@gmail.com.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Lead Nurturing
Many companies have adopted a strategy of lead nurturing. This is a marketing activity that prepares a lead to hear your offer when they are ready to make a decision. A sample lead nurturing program would include an email going out once a month sharing press releases, case studies, offers, or relevant articles. There are several different software applications that can facilitate these activities that can be found simply by Googling the term.
When should you nurture leads? There are primarily two occasions to nurture leads. The first is when you purchase a list of leads that may or may not need your products or services. You can purchase a list, start sending them emails, faxes or direct mail before you attempt to qualify them as prospects. Once the lead has been in the nurturing process for a period of time, or has taken some sort of action as a result of your marketing, you can remove it from the nurturing and hand it off to your Lead Generation Team and/or Sales Team.
The second occasion to nurture leads is when you get real time leads that are routed to your Sales Team or Lead Generation Team only to find out that the prospect is not ready to make a decision but is in the preliminary stages of collecting information. You can then place them in a nurturing campaign that provides them with the information that is beneficial to companies seeking your services. You can take this opportunity to persuade them to choose you before they are planning on selecting a solution.
As you implement a nurturing strategy, you will see that there is a larger chasm between marketing and sales than you previously thought. Since the majority of CRM solutions do not track leads well, and lead nurturing systems don’t pretend to manage sales opportunities, you will need to decide who owns the lead as it is being nurtured.
Thus enters Lead Nurturing 2.0 – Lead Response Management – which is powered by tools that allow transparent reporting for Marketing and Sales through the entire process. Lead Response Management mixes marketing or nurturing activities with sales and lead gen. activities so they can happen simultaneously instead of one at a time. A sample Lead Response Management strategy triggers a phone call right when a lead presses submit on your web form, followed by a series of emails, faxes and phone calls that vary depending on the outcome of the previous activity. The calls are scheduled for optimal contact times and are triggered automatically without the Lead Generation Team making the conscious decisions to call. Since Lead Response Management can happen while other activities are taking place, you can employ a strategy for new leads, old leads, recycled leads, lost leads, pipeline opportunities, cold deals, lost opportunities, existing clients and clients approaching renewal of contracts.
When should you nurture leads? There are primarily two occasions to nurture leads. The first is when you purchase a list of leads that may or may not need your products or services. You can purchase a list, start sending them emails, faxes or direct mail before you attempt to qualify them as prospects. Once the lead has been in the nurturing process for a period of time, or has taken some sort of action as a result of your marketing, you can remove it from the nurturing and hand it off to your Lead Generation Team and/or Sales Team.
The second occasion to nurture leads is when you get real time leads that are routed to your Sales Team or Lead Generation Team only to find out that the prospect is not ready to make a decision but is in the preliminary stages of collecting information. You can then place them in a nurturing campaign that provides them with the information that is beneficial to companies seeking your services. You can take this opportunity to persuade them to choose you before they are planning on selecting a solution.
As you implement a nurturing strategy, you will see that there is a larger chasm between marketing and sales than you previously thought. Since the majority of CRM solutions do not track leads well, and lead nurturing systems don’t pretend to manage sales opportunities, you will need to decide who owns the lead as it is being nurtured.
Thus enters Lead Nurturing 2.0 – Lead Response Management – which is powered by tools that allow transparent reporting for Marketing and Sales through the entire process. Lead Response Management mixes marketing or nurturing activities with sales and lead gen. activities so they can happen simultaneously instead of one at a time. A sample Lead Response Management strategy triggers a phone call right when a lead presses submit on your web form, followed by a series of emails, faxes and phone calls that vary depending on the outcome of the previous activity. The calls are scheduled for optimal contact times and are triggered automatically without the Lead Generation Team making the conscious decisions to call. Since Lead Response Management can happen while other activities are taking place, you can employ a strategy for new leads, old leads, recycled leads, lost leads, pipeline opportunities, cold deals, lost opportunities, existing clients and clients approaching renewal of contracts.
Fatal Flaw #1 Lack of Automation in a Sales Organization
The first fatal flaw that I would like to address is a lack of automation. For years, businesses have been run on paper. It was common to see a spinning rolodex on every corporate desktop. Memos, announcements, invoices, contracts, leads, PO’s, and reports would pile up on desks, in filing cabinets and in storage boxes. Even though computers have been around for decades now and all processes can be replicated via software, there are still businesses that are trailing this trend. Just like the paper vs. paperless debate, there is a new movement towards automating Sales and Marketing activities with the same hesitation.
I compare automation to going paperless because of the similar transitional mindset. It is hard to justify new expenses when it isn’t clear on their impact to overall costs (or revenues). As with any change, organizational buy-in is also a hurdle that must be overcome. And finally, why fix what isn’t broken. So, companies ease their way into it, starting with email auto-responders, pre written email templates and CRM for sales management.
What types of activities can be automated?
I am sure everyone has seen different types of automation in practice, from an email auto-responder to a pre-recorded voice message. Automation has continued to progress as lead nurturing companies have begun to surface. They employ automation to send out correspondence on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, but automation can go much further. Automation can:
· Share data between systems
· Send notifications
· Schedule tasks and events
· Trigger phone calls
· Send emails, faxes, and direct mail
· Route leads
· Assign and reassign ownership
· Generate support responses
· Facilitate lead response strategy
· Leave messages
Activity: take a look at your interactions with your prospects. List 5 activities, which, in an ideal world, would happen automatically without you thinking about it, such as follow up to a demo, or the creation of a quote? What activities would you add to your current process if they were done automatically?
What are the benefits of automation?
· Consistent interaction and message with prospects and customers
· Reporting
· Manage timing of responses
· Eliminate liability of human error
· Focus employees on more productive activities
Why automate?
There are really two reasons to automate. The first reason is time. If you can streamline processes and automate workflow, you can perform what you are currently doing with fewer people or you can achieve more with the same number of people. If your sales reps have more time to prospect and cold call because they are not bogged down with manually dialing phone numbers, writing emails, sending faxes and creating quotes, you will undoubtedly generate more sales. If your sales managers don’t have to manually hand out leads only to track them down at the end of the week, they will have more time to focus on increasing the abilities of the sales team.
Take a look at this excerpt from the white paper The 15 Time Wasters of Typical Sales Departments:
“Up to 60% of all calls a sales rep makes can go to voicemail or an answering machine, either directly or when routed by a receptionist. If a lead generation rep makes 200 calls in a day and 60% of these calls go to voicemail, he or she could leave 120 voice messages that average about 1 minute long. A single rep could waste 2 hours leaving messages—and that doesn’t include the time spent dialing and being transferred to a decision-maker’s voicemail box!
Most reps don’t make that many calls and don’t bother leaving nearly that many messages, but what if they could? We have seen call-back ratios that range from less than 1% to as high as 22%.”
If you could automate the process of leaving a message in all mailboxes while speaking to all live answers, could that have a positive impact on your productivity?
The second reason is competition. In business today, you have to be continually progressing or else someone else is going to pass you by. One of our clients informed us that in their particular industry, 80% of all deals go to the company that contacts the prospect first. Companies are constantly trying to get a leg up on their competition in order to capture more of the market. By automating your processes, you can gain an advantage over your competition which can help capture new business, retain existing business and garner referrals.
In conclusion, automating tasks, activities and processes can positively impact your organization. It is important to stay on the cutting edge (but be wary of the bleeding edge technologies out there) to help increase revenues, reduce costs and keep a competitive advantage in your industry.
I compare automation to going paperless because of the similar transitional mindset. It is hard to justify new expenses when it isn’t clear on their impact to overall costs (or revenues). As with any change, organizational buy-in is also a hurdle that must be overcome. And finally, why fix what isn’t broken. So, companies ease their way into it, starting with email auto-responders, pre written email templates and CRM for sales management.
What types of activities can be automated?
I am sure everyone has seen different types of automation in practice, from an email auto-responder to a pre-recorded voice message. Automation has continued to progress as lead nurturing companies have begun to surface. They employ automation to send out correspondence on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, but automation can go much further. Automation can:
· Share data between systems
· Send notifications
· Schedule tasks and events
· Trigger phone calls
· Send emails, faxes, and direct mail
· Route leads
· Assign and reassign ownership
· Generate support responses
· Facilitate lead response strategy
· Leave messages
Activity: take a look at your interactions with your prospects. List 5 activities, which, in an ideal world, would happen automatically without you thinking about it, such as follow up to a demo, or the creation of a quote? What activities would you add to your current process if they were done automatically?
What are the benefits of automation?
· Consistent interaction and message with prospects and customers
· Reporting
· Manage timing of responses
· Eliminate liability of human error
· Focus employees on more productive activities
Why automate?
There are really two reasons to automate. The first reason is time. If you can streamline processes and automate workflow, you can perform what you are currently doing with fewer people or you can achieve more with the same number of people. If your sales reps have more time to prospect and cold call because they are not bogged down with manually dialing phone numbers, writing emails, sending faxes and creating quotes, you will undoubtedly generate more sales. If your sales managers don’t have to manually hand out leads only to track them down at the end of the week, they will have more time to focus on increasing the abilities of the sales team.
Take a look at this excerpt from the white paper The 15 Time Wasters of Typical Sales Departments:
“Up to 60% of all calls a sales rep makes can go to voicemail or an answering machine, either directly or when routed by a receptionist. If a lead generation rep makes 200 calls in a day and 60% of these calls go to voicemail, he or she could leave 120 voice messages that average about 1 minute long. A single rep could waste 2 hours leaving messages—and that doesn’t include the time spent dialing and being transferred to a decision-maker’s voicemail box!
Most reps don’t make that many calls and don’t bother leaving nearly that many messages, but what if they could? We have seen call-back ratios that range from less than 1% to as high as 22%.”
If you could automate the process of leaving a message in all mailboxes while speaking to all live answers, could that have a positive impact on your productivity?
The second reason is competition. In business today, you have to be continually progressing or else someone else is going to pass you by. One of our clients informed us that in their particular industry, 80% of all deals go to the company that contacts the prospect first. Companies are constantly trying to get a leg up on their competition in order to capture more of the market. By automating your processes, you can gain an advantage over your competition which can help capture new business, retain existing business and garner referrals.
In conclusion, automating tasks, activities and processes can positively impact your organization. It is important to stay on the cutting edge (but be wary of the bleeding edge technologies out there) to help increase revenues, reduce costs and keep a competitive advantage in your industry.
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